In what doctors Tuesday said was a medical first, an Argentine woman with a transplanted heart has given birth to a baby girl following an in vitro fertilization.

Pregnancy after an organ transplant is always a high risk proposition because the drugs needed to ensure the transplanted organ is not rejected make pregnancy difficult, and their effects on the fetus are not clear.

"There is no record in the world of a transplant patient who has achieved pregnancy through in vitro fertilization," said Gustavo Leguizamon, head of the high risk pregnancy centre in Buenos Aires, where the treatment was performed.

The risks are even greater in heart patients because women have 40 per cent more blood during pregnancy, putting extra strain on the heart.

"This could lead to not enough blood getting to the uterus, causing the baby to grow less" and a possibly premature birth, Mr Leguizamon said.

The medications needed to perform in vitro fertilization added yet another layer of complication, said Ricardo James, a reproductive specialist at the high risk center.

But the risks did not stop Juliana Finondo, 39, who was determined to chase her dream of motherhood.

"I was never afraid. Maybe I'm too optimistic," she said.

The graphic designer from eastern Argentina, who now lives in Buenos Aires, had a heart transplant in 1999. At the time, doctors told her she could not risk getting pregnant after the surgery.

A decade later, she decided to try - but two years passed without getting pregnant naturally.

So after Ms Finondo was carefully examined to ensure she didn't show any signs of rejecting her heart, her doctors designed a special medication plan to wean her from the drugs, adding to her difficulties conceiving and to add in the fertility drugs needed for in vitro fertilisation.

Luckily, Ms Finondo got pregnant on her first round of IVF. And after nine months of strict monitoring her healthy daughter Emilia was born on January 15.

Ms Finondo's cardiologist Sergio Perrone said the case shatters prejudices of the limitations of a life post-transplant.

"Today a transplant patient has an excellent quality of life, much better than people realize," Perrone said.

He said he also hoped the story would encourage people to consider organ donation, "because it saves one life, which can be multiplied by so many more."

The infant Emilia "will become a mother in her time," he said.

In Argentina, in 2012, 630 donors contributed organs to 1,458 patients, a record rate of 15.7 donors per million people.

But there are 7,290 patients on the waiting list, according to government figures.

Source: AFP

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Friday, January 25, 2013

Smokers who quit while still young can live almost as long as people who never smoked, new Canadian research has found.

While it’s estimated that smoking cuts at least 10 years off a person’s lifespan, new analysis from researchers at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital finds that people who quit smoking before the age of 40 regain almost all of those potentially lost years.

“The most important message is that quitting works,” lead researcher Dr. Prabhat Jha told CTV News. “Cessation of smoking at an early age -- even up to age 40 -- avoids about 90 per cent of the risk of continuing to smoke.

“And the risk is big. Smokers are looking at a decade of life lost, a decade of good life lost.”

Jha -- head of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s -- led a team who examined health records from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey. They also looked at data from the National Death Index, narrowing in on 16,000 people who had died but who had reported smoking earlier in life.

They found that people who never smoked were about twice as likely to live to age 80 than those who did.

But they also found that people who quit smoking between 35 and 44 years of age gained about nine years life back. Those who quit between ages 45-54 and 55-64 gained six and four years of life, respectively.

Jha stresses his team’s findings shouldn’t be interpreted as saying it’s safe to smoke until 40 and then stop. Former smokers still have a greater risk of dying sooner than non-smokers, he says.

But the risk is small compared to the huge risk taken by those who continue to smoke.

Many smokers have the belief that if they’ve been smoking for a decade or more already, it’s too late to quit.

Jha says that’s simply not true.

“Quitting at any age will have benefits, but particularly if you quit before age 40, you get close to never-smoker death rates,” he says.

Jha explains some of the effects of a smoker’s past history linger while others don’t. For example, ex-smokers still have a higher risk of developing lung cancer than those who never smoked, though of course their risk not as high as for those who continue to smoke.

But for other causes of death -- such as a sudden heart attack -- the effects of smoking can be erased with time.

“You can get a sudden narrowing of your artery if you’re a smoker and that leads to a heart attack. But if you quit smoking, that risk pretty much disappears. So it does vary by disease,” Jha says.

The study is also among the first to examine the death rates of the generation of women who started smoking when they were young and kept smoking through their adult lives.

Studies in the 1980s suggested the risks of smoking in these women were low, but this new research suggests they too lose about 10 years of life by continuing to smoke.

“Basically, if women smoke like men, they die like men,” says Jha. “That means about a decade of life lost. Not a few years, but a full decade -- a healthy decade of life lost.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Disease Control Priorities-3 project of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

All the findings appear in the most recent edition of New England Journal of Medicine.

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Monday, January 21, 2013

More than a year after a Texas woman underwent a lifesaving double lung transplant, she has met the family of the donor who made it possible.

Nancy Suarez Lee, 54, is alive today thanks to 26-year-old wife and mother Brittany Saucier, who was killed in 2011 in an freak accident in Mississippi.

And on Thursday, she was able to say thank you to Saucier's mother, younger sister and godmother in person for the incredible gift she received.

Emotional: Nancy Suarez Lee, right, of North Richland Hills, hugs Ellen DuVernay, second from right. while DuVernay's other daughter Kortney, left, hugs Lee's daughter Jessica, second from left

'I've been waiting for this day for a long time,' Lee told the Star-Telegram. 'I am about to meet the mother of my lungs. So that's just really kind of an amazing thing.'

The families had communicated for months through telephone calls, text messages and Facebook.

But Ellen DuVernay, Saucier's mother, still expected to be overwhelmed when her plane touched down at Dallas airport.

'I am sure we will both do some crying,' DuVernay said the day before flying out from Mississippi to meet Lee and her loved ones for the first time.

'But I feel like I am about to meet family.'

Lee was born with Hermansky-Pudlack Syndrome, a genetic, metabolic disorder that causes albinism and can lead to pulmonary fibrosis, which causes the lungs to become damaged or scarred and stop functioning properly, according to the newspaper.

Thankful: Nancy Suarez Lee, 54, right, is alive today thanks to 26-year-old wife and mother Brittany Saucier, who was killed in an accident in Mississippi

In 2010, her lungs started to fail and Lee, the mother of three adult children and a stepson, began to require oxygen.

Climbing stairs and showering became difficult, if not impossible, tasks for the human resources manager.

By June 2011, she was on the waiting list for new lungs at UT Southwestern Medical Center.Lee was still on the waiting list on September 20, 2011, the day that Saucier slipped from a golf cart she was riding in with her mother and her four-year-old daughter Mackenzie, hitting her head on the street.

She had a seizure and was rushed to hospital.

When it was clear that Saucier would not survive, DuVernay and her husband Larry learned that their daughter was an organ donor.

Sick: Lee was born with Hermansky-Pudlack Syndrome, a genetic, metabolic disorder that causes albinism and can lead to pulmonary fibrosis, which causes the lungs to become damaged or scarred and stop functioning properly

'She had always been so generous to others,' DuVernay told the Star-Telegram. 'And she was that way until the day she died.'

Hours later, surgeons were transplanting Saucier's lungs into Lee. The young woman's liver went to a father in Georgia. Her kidneys went to two men in Mississippi.

Lee knew nothing about her donor until a few months ago as transplant officials suggest that organ recipients wait for at least a year to contact a donor's family.

But it turned out DuVernay was writing a letter to Lee.

Lee got the letter in October and at dinner that night, with 13 relatives surrounding her, she read silently, tears in her eyes, sharing snippets aloud.

'She was a female ... Her name was Brittany ... She had a little girl,' she told them.

By the end, everyone at the table was in tears.

Donor: Brittany Lynn DuVernay Saucier, pictured, died in an accident but donated her lungs to Nancy Suarez Lee, saving her life

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The photo of a transplant patient holding her heart in her hands after a successful transplant surgery has been posted online. The photo shows a woman with a medical mask covering her face, holding her old dead heart while another beats in her chest.

The photo showing Penny "literally holding her heart in her hands" at the moment of her triumph over crippling illness was snapped by her friend Kesley who posted it to Imgur with the caption: "This is my friend Penny. She is holding her own heart. She has survived cancer and crippling heart failure but never lost hope."

Penny holds her old abandoned heart in her two hands like a trophy (see photo below), with the wide grin on her face visible through her medical mask.

The website also reports that every year about 4,000 people in the US need a heart transplant but only about 2,3000 are able to get it. Worldwide, only about 3,5000 people get heart a heart transplant every year.

Penny, therefore, has good reason to smile; she is one of the lucky few.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Benefit to aid heart transplant recipient

Stephanie Larson is a nurse in her thirties who lives with her husband and two small children in Staples. When she was out with friends one night in October 2011, something happened that was inconceivable for someone at her age and fitness level.

Stephanie Larson - submitted photo

In front her friends, in the middle of what was supposed to be a relaxing night out, Larson’s heart began to fail, and eventually stopped beating altogether. It was only the CPR given by the other nurses in the group of friends that kept her alive until first responders could whisk her away to Tri-County Health Care (TCHC), where the people fighting to stabilize her were all co-workers.

“Fortunately, I don’t remember any of that,” Larson said.

She said it was hard enough hearing about what happened secondhand from the people who were there – the friends who had to tell Larson’s family what had happened, her fellow nurses who had to watch her struggle for life.

“Just hearing their stories, it was very emotional,” Larson said.

One side of Larson’s heart couldn’t recover after the cardiac arrest, and she was sent to the University of Minnesota Hospital in the Twin Cities to have a special pump put in. After she became acclimated to the new device, Larson eventually was able to go home that December, but with restrictions.

“No showers or baths or swimming; all the fun stuff you take for granted,” Larson said.

In May 2012, she was put on a heart transplant list. Those with her kind of pump typically receive the highest priority status to receive a transplant, 1A.

In September, Larson finally had her transplant, but her troubles were far from over.

“Things just went downhill,” she said.

Her case was unique in that doctors didn’t fully understand what was going on, and it seemed as if her body was rejecting her new heart.

“They called it a ‘stunned’ heart,” Larson said.

Not only did Larson have to go on life support, but doctors had to filter all of the blood in her body to get rid of any antibodies that might have been reacting to the new organ. But after a week or so she was able to wake up, and has been on the road to recovery ever since.

During the entire length of her ordeal, Larson has persevered through five open-heart surgeries. Now she’s considering returning to work at TCHC with the same people who helped save her life.

Stephanie Beste has known Larson since eighth grade, and visited her when she was hospitalized. Beste was able to describe the emotional experience of seeing her friend fight through the life-threatening debacle.

“It was a roller coaster. She would be really bad. There were several times where her heart stopped and they had to resuscitate her,” Beste said, “and she would surprise us all and all of the sudden she would surpass even what the doctors thought she would do.”

In order to cover medical costs for Larson’s transplant and medical care, Beste and Maryann Burrows, another old friend of Larson’s, have organized an April 13 benefit to be held at Town’s Edge in Staples, which will include a spaghetti dinner and silent auction where people can provide donations.

Those wishing to donate silent auction items can drop them off at Mid-Central Federal Savings Bank in Staples, and donations from those unable to attend the banquet will also be accepted at the bank.

Burrows said people as far as the Twin Cities have shown support for Larson.

“I’m really hoping we have really good turnout,” she said. “It’s nice to know that all these people care about you and want to hear your story.”

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